The IPCC’s assessment reports are widely regarded as the ultimate references on climate matters. Behind this esteem is a belief that teams of scientists impartially evaluated a vast pool of information and together drafted and refined an impeccable document for each report. The gulf between this belief and reality is in fact huge.

The problems were highlighted by “Glaciergate”, the IPCC’s flawed comments about the Himalayan glaciers.

This section of the IPCC report opened with comments about the area of Himalayan glaciers covering 3 million hectares, which is 30,000 sq. km., and said shortly afterwards that the likelihood of them disappearing by 2035 is very high. In the next paragraph the report says that the glaciers are predicted to shrink from 500,000 sq. km. to 100,000 sq. km. by year 2035, which contradicts the earlier statements both in extent and state of retreat.

It appears that most of the IPCC’s text was a verbatim copy of passages from an article in the Indian magazine Down to Earth, not the source given in the IPCC report, with quotes in that article becoming factual statements in the IPCC report. The retreat by the year 2035 was mentioned in the article but trace the source of that information we find it was an incorrect transcription of year 2350 and the shrinkage to 100,000 sq. km. was a comment about the total of all glaciers outside the polar regions.

How could these errors and inconsistencies appear in the IPCC report, supposedly the authority on climate matters?

The answer lies in the IPCC’s procedures and in the tasks assigned to authors, reviewers and review editors of the reports.

No-one is assigned the work of policing IPCC procedures and the only people to check authors’ work are the expert reviewers, whose role is to “comment on the accuracy and completeness of the … content and … balance of the drafts … according to their own knowledge and experience.” IPCC procedures fail to mention what happens if no experts are available in a particular subject area, so presumably any review is ad hoc and by people less than expert in the subject.

The stories of a warming world continued into the late 1950s as the media inertia plowed forward adding to the warming stories of the 1930s and 40s. The Atlantic Ocean had been warming since the mid 1920s. This warming was keeping the arctic milder by pumping warmer water northward trough the Gulf Stream . On February 15, 1959 the New York Times reported “Arctic findings in particular support theory of rising global temperatures.” However the temperature of the earth was not warming, it was falling. The massive and dominant Pacific had been cooler since the mid 1940s and would continue to be so into the mid 1970s. Climate data show that starting in the mid-1940s the earth began a multi-decadal cooling trend. Around 1960 the Atlantic began to cool again. Now both oceans were in their cooler phase. The two oceans were working in tandem to chill the planet. It was not until later in the 1960s that the media began to really notice.

On November 15, 1969 Science News quoted meteorologist Dr. J. Murray Mitchell Jr. “How long the current cooling trend continues is one of the most important problems of our civilizations.” Where have we heard that before? Mitchell continued “If the cooling continues for another 200 to 300 years the earth could be plunged into an ice age.” On January 11, 1970 the Washington Post ran the headline “Colder Winters Held Dawn of New Ice Age” The story read “Better get a good grip on your long johns cold weather haters, the worst may be yet to come.” Fortune Magazine reported in February of 1974 “It is the root cause of a lot of that unpleasant weather around the world and they warn that it carries the potential for human disasters of unprecedented magnitude.” Sound familiar? In the June 24, 1970 edition Time Magazine wrote “Climatological Cassandras are becoming increasingly apprehensive, for the weather aberrations they are studying may be the harbinger of another ice age.” Newsweek on April 28, 1975 wrote that “The earth’s climate seems to be cooling down.” According to Newsweek “meteorologists” were “almost unanimous in the view that the trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century.”

So it looked like we were on the precipice of a new ice age with cataclysmic consequences for the world. Then, stealthily to all, the Pacific Ocean began to warm again and so did the earth’s temperature. All the stories of the next ice age, the dramatic drop in food production and all the hardships to come disappeared fast…again.

The world is warming at an unprecedented rate. The dire and irrefutable results of this global temperature heat wave will be starvation, inundation of coastal cities, war and the death of billions and the mass extinction of species. But the latest twist is that now climate change is anthropogenic, man-made, and so we must change the way we live, the way we produce energy or we will kill everyone and the planet. These warnings come to us from reliable news media. We have been alerted to this climate catastrophe for two decades now. Surely all these respected and long-lived newspapers, magazines and television networks can be trusted to tell us what the current state of the climate is and what it will do. At least one would think so.

Interestingly, the history of climate reporting in the press reveals many dirty little inconvenient truths not unlike so many other alarmisms, from the “population bomb” which would have caused the death of two billion people by the 1980s, to aids, which would have infected the majority of Americans by 2000 and, to the Y2K disaster that never came to be. Of course, barely dig into the story and social engineering emerges from politicians, Hollywood stars and assorted activists. In turn, with the support of the ubiquitous “scientists,” they take umbrage for their social aims.

When one looks carefully back at the history of climate stories in the media a remarkably consistent theme re-occurs. It borders to a comedy routine had it not had such massive public impact during the last few years.

In an address to Green Mountain College on May 15, Carol Browner, Director of Energy and Climate Change Policy, stated “The sooner the U.S. puts a cap on our dangerous carbon pollution, the sooner we can create a new generation of clean energy jobs here in America…” In July, 2009, President Obama lauded the “Cash for Clunkers” program, stating that the initiative “gives consumers a break, reduces dangerous carbon pollution, and our dependence on foreign oil…” Unfortunately, our President is misinformed about carbon pollution.

The phrase “dangerous carbon pollution” has become standard propaganda from environmental groups. An example is a May, 2010 press release from the World Wildlife Fund that called for “a science-based limit on dangerous carbon pollution that will send a strong signal to the private sector.” Environmentalists have successfully painted a picture of black particle emissions into the atmosphere. This misconception is being used to drive efforts for Cap & Trade legislation, renewable energy, and every sort of restriction on our light bulbs, vehicles, and houses—all in the misguided attempt to stop climate change.

by Des MooreQuadrant Online, October 7, 2010
The end of scientific consensus

The Royal Society, which is Britain’s top dog in science (indeed many scientists would say the world), has just published a report signalling the end of claims of a consensus by some climate scientists and some governments that the world faces dangerous warming unless governments act quickly to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases.

The report, Climate Change: a summary of the science, points out that climate change “continues to be the subject of intensive scientific research and public debate” and divides the existing state of knowledge into three categories – science that is well established, where there is wide consensus but continuing debate, and where there remains substantial uncertainty.

In the latter category, for example, the acknowledgment that the uptake of CO2 by the land and oceans is “very poorly understood” is tantamount to saying that it is not possible to predict with any confidence the future concentration levels of CO2 in the atmosphere. It certainly leaves open the possibility that the uptake of CO2 by land and oceans will be considerably higher than the extreme 25% rate projected by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (it is currently 50%). If that happened it would mean that concentrations of CO2 (and other greenhouse gases) would reach supposedly dangerous levels at a significantly later date than the alarmists are predicting – and temperatures would rise less.

Further, while claiming “strong evidence” exists that warming has been caused “largely by human activity”, it acknowledges that the size of future temperature increases and other aspects of climate change are “still subject to uncertainty” and that the attribution of forced climate change to particular causes is “not straight forward”. Remarkably, the report also accepts that since 1910 increases in temperature have occurred in only two periods – from 1910 to 1940 and from 1975 to around 2000 – that is, for only about half of the last century. Although the usual scientific explanation of the warming thesis is that temperature increases are caused by increased concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere, the Royal Society report provides no explanation of why the increase in CO2 concentrations during most of the century did not result in continuing temperature increases.

However, perhaps the most devastating statement for alarmists is that “It is not possible to determine exactly how much the Earth will warm or exactly how the climate will change in the future”. This leaves in doubt what policy should be adopted, and when, to reduce emissions. The report’s acceptance that uncertainty exists about the effect clouds have on temperatures is one important reason for delaying action. Another is the acknowledgement of poor scientific understanding in various other areas, such as the likely extent of reductions in ice sheets in Greenland and West Antarctica from any further temperature increases. Yet another is the admission that “there is little confidence” in projections by models of climate change in regions, including Western Europe. This also suggests that predictions of worsening drought conditions in the Murray Darling Basin have no scientific basis.